I cradle her disease in my palm, ignoring the slow rot, the white ants, the sands of the hourglass.
Artist Statement
Hands is a meditative piece that reflects on love and illness, and the way the mother-daughter connection exists and evolves through time, place, and the maternal body.
A mother’s hands are the source of motherwork: always busy, never still. Many years ago, while sitting in a hospital room holding the stilled hand of my mother in one hand and cradling my pregnant belly in the other, I was keenly aware that outside of that room life seemed to be carrying on without us, producing a fractured sense of time both standing still and rushing on, running out, even as new life bloomed within me. Hands is a reflection on that single moment, and the way illness collides with memory and the maternal body to produce a plurality of meaning that is revealed in those punctuated silences.
Biography
Shereen Ricupero is a Perth-based writer who, through the practice of psychogeography, explores the behaviours and emotions that inform the connections between time, place and motherhood. Shereen’s creative works seek to interrogate the lines of thought that engage with the emotional effects of the geographical landscape, and the layers of personal and cultural stories that exist in the everyday places and spaces we inhabit. In 2022 her poem No Place For Flowers won the most valuable prize, the NALAG award, in the Hunter Writers’ Centre’s Grieve Project, and Hands was longlisted and published in the 2024 Hunter Writers’ Centre Grieve Anthology. Shereen completed a Master of Media and Communication (Social and Cultural Inquiry) in 2020, and she is currently working towards a PhD at Curtin University examining psychogeography, motherhood and maternal identity in creative nonfiction.
Connect
Instagram: @secretcitywanders
LinkedIn: Shereen Ricupero
list of works
Shereen Ricupero
Hands
2023
Creative non-fiction
60cm x 42cm, variable
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Artwork
